“Apple’s OS X Snow Leopard, which shipped in August 2009, continued to resist retirement last month, new data showed,” Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld.

“January statistics from Web analytics vendor Net Applications pegged Snow Leopard’s share of all Macs at 28.2 percent, half a point higher than the 27.7 percent recorded by OS X Lion,” Keizer reports. “It was the fourth month in a row that Snow Leopard has been in second place, behind the newest edition, OS X Mountain Lion, but ahead of 2011’s Lion… Mountain Lion, which Apple shipped in July 2012, again gained ground last month at the expense of its predecessors, ending January in the No. 1 position with 34.5 percent of all Macs.”

Keizer reports, “Many have declared that they would not abandon Snow Leopard because it was the last that let users run applications compiled for the PowerPC processor.”

Safari and Screen Sharing work perfectly for me in Mountain Lion and I don’t recall any difference in how they behaved on Lion. Also, keep in mind that the latest version of Safari is also available for Snow Leopard, and works exactly the same there as it does in Lion and Mountain Lion. I would love to hear what issues you’re having, though, as it might be possible to easily remedy the situation. Plus, it’s entirely possible that whatever changed for you in Lion was simply a matter of changing the perspective in which you used a certain feature, rather than its removal/redesign entirely.

Indeed, and that is a frustrating feature removal for those that depend on it. But I didn’t comment on Rosetta, because I already knew that it didn’t work and there is no reliable solution short of refusing to upgrade.

I was specifically asking what had broken in Safari and Screen Sharing. I’m most curious about Safari, as Safari 5 was available for Lion for quite some time. If Safari 6 broke something, I’d be interested to hear what it is. I started using Chrome for some time because I grew tired of how resource-hungry Safari 5 was. However, Safari 6 uses far fewer resources than any other web browser on the Mac according to several studies (except in a few categories, such as memory reclamation, though that is easily remedied by quitting and reopening Safari).

Screen Sharing in Lion, to my knowledge, is identical to Screen Sharing in Snow Leopard, so I would like to know what changed/was broken.

Screen Sharing is different. With both, you have to enter your name and password, and with Lion to Lion, it asks the sharer to allow the sharing. SL to Lion, you can just connect. But worse, I find that with SL to Lion, if the SL end happens to go to sleep, on waking the Lion end will often kernel panic :-( Then I have to endure Lion going through OMG checking, and a couple of times I then couldn’t log back in without running permissions repairs.

I had never experienced the Screen Sharing issue in Lion, as all of my computers use the same login. I can see why that would be frustrating. If you’re up for a slight change in your workflow, here’s a great way to work around that:

As for the KP’s, there is likely some other issue with your computer, either software or hardware. I would strongly recommend a complete backup followed by an erase & install of your OS to determine if it resolves the issue. If it does not, then there may be a hardware fault. Your panic.log file might give an indication what is causing the KP, though if you’re not familiar with them, I would suggest sharing them with someone that is.

“I didn’t comment on Rosetta, because I already knew that it didn’t work and there is no reliable solution short of refusing to upgrade.” thethirdshoe’s point made–and yet you still “yeah, but stilled”

Actually, that’s not a “yeah, but still” argument. “Yeah, but still” would have been if I said that Rosetta not working is a valid argument, but here’s 3 reasons why you shouldn’t be using Rosetta anyway.

Instead, I pointed out that his concerns about Rosetta are valid, but that in my experience, Sucker’s concerns about Screen Sharing and Safari were non-issues, unless he was having problems with them that I wasn’t (which, FuzzyBo seems to be having, and to which I have already responded).

If you’re going to challenge someone for making a fallacious argument, be certain that you understand when an argument is fallacious and when it is not.

For one thing, the program that allows you to translate older versions of documents into ones that are readable by newer versions of document-based software. MacLinkPlus was never updated into an Intel version.

For me, a copy of Adobe CS 1 I won long ago. I just play with it to learn about it, so I can’t justify replacing it. Appleworks, unless I missed the part where there is a decent drawing program that can replace it and open all of the files I have in that format. And games. I have lots of PPC only games that I still enjoy playing. They either have not been replaced, or the new versions (games are rarely updated in a situation like this, they just get primarily bug fixes) are just something I do not find entertaining, or in some cases, the newer games just plain suck. So I stick with SL, along with most of my Mac using friends (unless they’ve bought a new Mac, in which case there has been a few questions about going back to SL…)

Not to mention custom programs that people have built their business on. Low and behold, some people try to avoid allocating developer resources to update a perfectly working app. It is usually the combination of new features and dropped support that prevents one from upgrading.
It is possible, though, to run Tiger and Leopard under VirtualBox and get the job done, but you need a well-equipped recent Mac to get decent performance.

We use Mountain Lion on all of our workstations but all of our servers continue to run Snow Leopard. The move to Lion Server and the follow up Mountain Lion Server is just too big a step backwards to even consider. While Snow Leopard Server isn’t the wondrous thing that many of us had hoped, the replacements are toys designed for small workgroups at best.

You are absolutely right. When I bought my i7-equipped, 27-inch iMac, it came with 10.5. But I just love Snow Leopard because it can run my old OS X / PowerPC apps using Rosetta. Furthermore, using Sheepshaver, I run my entire original OS 7.5.5 Mac and all its apps and all my ancient documents, including WriteNow docs. And I have Bootcamp installed so I can run special medical software using XP Pro.

My Mac is like an F-22 fighter at work; all the other schmooks running Windblows on their F-4 Phantoms can’t do a fraction of the work that I can do.

That’s real good to know. I’ll check into vMac. How easy was it to install? I had installed Sheepshaver several months before the truly good version was consolidated onto the current, dominant website and the installation was a confusing pain because key steps did not worked as advertised.

That’s on Intuit, not Apple. Their refusal to keep up with the latest technology will be their undoing. I moved on from Quicken entirely years ago, as did many others. And, with the advent of the iPhone and the iPad, the need for Quicken for many people has been supplanted by apps that people carry with them everywhere.

Although, to be fair, QuickBooks alternatives are less readily available, which could be another good reason why Snow Leopard hangs on so tightly.

The Quicken for Lion is still Quicken 2007, literally years out of date – or you can get Quicken Essentials which is mostly just a checkbook program. We switched to MoneyDance last year to support a company that actually updates their Mac products.

We’re getting a little off topic here, as the discussion is about Lion compatibility, not feature lists. But, as Apple states in their support article, AirPlay Mirroring is only supported on Macs that have 2nd and 3rd gen Intel Core processors that have special hardware video encoding tech:

As for AirDrop, it is again a hardware-based feature. Certain AirPort cards support technology that others don’t. You can still activate AirDrop using a terminal command ( defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces 1 ), but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it will either be unreliable or not secure.

Power Nap can’t be mimicked by any third-parties yet, due to the fact that computers that don’t support it are simply asleep when they’re asleep, not Power Napping.

Just because a product CAN support a specific feature, doesn’t mean it should. Apple released iOS 4 for the iPhone 3G and it was awful. Even with the missing features, it was still slow and buggy. Since then, they’ve taken pains to make sure that no feature is released for a product where it may not perform up to snuff (except, arguably, Siri—the best explanation of its absence on iOS 4 was to prevent overload of the service, not because the device couldn’t handle it).

I would like to see what developers have made Air Drop and AirPlay Mirroring available for unsupported Macs and to see how well they work. I’ve not seen any alternatives, but would be interested to recommend them to others if they are indeed as useful as you claim.

Any Core 2 Duo equipped Mac can move past Snow Leopard, including the above mentioned machines. It’s possible that the machines won’t take Mountain Lion, but Lion is supported on each and every mac sold after August 2007, and many from before then.

Some of us need to use specialized software that has not, and will not, be updated to to Intel. Some of it is the company went out of business, some of it was written by academic organizations that have moved on to other projects.

As someone above noted, maintaining backwards compatibility is the one thing MS does right.

Well, Apple really trashed server when they went to leopard. The last really usable server is SL. The newer DNS, DHCP, web server, and wiki, are particularly useless. But the whole package is a steaming POS.

The biggest advantage to Snow Leopard in an actual work prod unction environment is that the work procedures in terms of knowing where and when your files are actually saved and stored are far more transparent.

So glad they put Save As back because due to the complexity of my projects, some web projects with several hundred files, I have to know exactly when and where my files are saved, having the OS decide where they are saved is a non-starter.

Thats the problem with Lion and Mountain Lion. I use Mountain Lion because so much of my software requires it.

I never understood the fascination for Snow Leopard. If you don’t need Rosetta and your processor supports Lion / Mountain Lion there is simply no reason to resist the progress. Once you get used to ML there is no way back. SL then looks like bubble gum from the 80ies. If you don’t like Launchpad and Notification (like me), just don’t use it (like me). But there are so many other helpful things like natural scrolling. That alone would be worth the upgrade. Once it is understood, there is no way back at all. Give ML a try, it’s worth it. (Yes, I am a pro user! I make my living from working on a Mac every day!)

Actually, they will have a choice. They’ve already made it, in fact. If Apple had “no choice”, then Safari 6 would have been made available for 10.6. iCloud support is missing from 10.6 and isn’t coming. Messages only works on Mountain Lion. Apple doesn’t look to the past. They’ve moved on. If you can’t do the same, then you’ll be left behind. There are plenty of growth opportunities left for Apple.

Sure, Apple can attempt to force it planned obsolescence on its customers, but to be frank, OS 10.7 and 10.8 don’t offer any additional value for the productivity user. If Apple wants its customers to upgrade between hardware refreshes, customers need a reason. The ONLY reason Mtn Lion has more customers than Snow Leopard is because new Mac buyers don’t want to reload the OS. They simply turn off all the crap features and live with what they have.

For enterprise, the first thing to do is disable Notifications and other time wasters. iCloud is never used because critical file sharing in many/most businesses cannot be trusted to unaccountable 3rd parties, especially ones that don’t support cross-platform access. ML FAIL.

Safari 6 uses a fraction of the system resources that Safari 5 did. In fact, Safari 6 uses less memory than both Chrome and Firefox. I switched to Chrome quite some time ago because it made my system run so much smoother, but when Safari 6 was released, I gave it a shot and soon discovered that it was taking up much less RAM than Chrome had. When I looked for a comparison between browsers, I found a shootout online that indicated that Safari used significantly less memory than all the other browsers:

I’m not sure if they included Safari Web Content in their memory usage total, so they could have made a mistake, but even with 26 tabs in 5 windows open, Safari is only using a total of 1GB of RAM on my machine right now.

Also, new Mac buyers can’t reload the OS. If your Mac ships with Mountain Lion on it, it will not accept any earlier OS on it.

natural scrolling whatever, that does not matter to me one way or the other.

Launchpad is silly, Notifications are great, but my big issue is the one of where and when files are stored. My applications require project folders and Mountain Lion tries to “enforce its will” on that.

That is not an option for me, so I have had to enforce my will based upon my needs, and Save As is the most practical way to do it. I open a finder window that shows exactly where and when each file is saved. Sorry, there is no other practical way.